Waking Up After 2020

By Kirsten Mowrey

Here we are in autumn and soon leaning toward winter, the holiday time when we gather with loved ones—when home becomes the warmth we circle around. When my spouse and I bought our house twenty years ago, we talked about getting a mezuzah. Mezuzahs are hung on the thresholds of Jewish homes, to signify the transition from the outer world to the inner. Inside each mezuzah is a prayer from the book of Deuteronomy. There was just one little hitch: Neither of us were Jewish.

Seeking, for spiritual and psychological reasons, is a common theme in Western society. We often talk about “what” we are searching for, yet I think a more relevant question may be “why” are we searching in the first place? Why was I looking outside Christianity for benediction and blessing for my home? I had attended Episcopal church, Catholic school, and Greek Orthodox services for years. So why a mezuzah? Why Judaism?

One reason is I felt empty inside—a hollowness filled with despair and grief. I felt that I was not welcome in the world—that there was no place for me in those other communities. Psychologist Francis Weller calls this one of the gates of grief: we expected community but did not receive it. Our physical and psychic expectations were to be born into the village, he writes, as generations of our ancestors were—welcomed and acknowledged into community and communal life. Weller’s representation of our psyche looks like nesting Russian dolls: we are an individual body born within a family, nestled within a community, inside a clan, and part of the web of the cosmos. I felt a sigh and a sob within my soul when I first read that, a “yes” from my heart. In The Wild Edge of Sorrow Weller says, “The absence of these…haunts us, even if we can’t give them a name, and we feel their loss as an ache, a vague sadness that settles over us like a fog.” 

In searching to fill this emptiness, I shopped the spiritual marketplace. If Christianity wasn’t for me, capitalism taught me I could purchase my way into another spirituality—a better, more pure and authentic form. My answer was the Four Winds Society. Ostensibly based on “shamanic energy practices” of the Andes, the program was an amalgam of spiritual practices from around the world. Hindu chakras, Jungian psychology, Indigenous North American smudging, Tibetan Buddhist breathing techniques, all stitched together with a South American Indigenous cosmology. I was so empty I devoured it. Class after class, hungry for a “tribe” and a place to spiritually belong, I zealously practiced my new skills, diving deep into the teachings. As I did, I realized there was no solid ground to the teaching, no single traceable tradition rooted in a place and a people. Four Winds work bonded multiple non-Western spiritualities, gilded them with a coat of indigenousness, and sold it to those with money to spend. My hunger and grief for community led me directly into the arms of cultural appropriation.

“Cultural appropriation” is the term for adopting practices, rituals, ceremonies, and rites from another group without their permission. Capitalism appropriates practices like smudging, sweat lodges, chakra cleansing, and mezuzahs, which are commodified and sold in the wellness and spirituality marketplace. Users participate in these practices to heal but also to give a sense of identity and belonging to the originating culture. Capitalism typically works hand in hand with colonialism, defined by Webster’s as “control by one power over an area or people in order to exploit them economically.” Capitalism also financially rewards the marketer of the commodity at the expense of the original culture. In a capitalist mindset, culture can be consumed the way you eat an apple. Yet smudging and chakras didn’t make me feel less hollow, less grief stricken, less hungering for community. If anything, the semblance of connection, the ghostly appearance of community made me even more hungry for belonging, for the village birthright, for many faces welcoming me. Ultimately, borrowed practices didn’t fill me; they left me feeling more loss. In my participation of appropriated practices, I perpetuated a history of colonization on this continent that began with taking land, and lives, and now culture and spirit.

I recognize I was motivated by my own pain and emptiness, that I had no intention to steal from others. Yet, the lesson of 2020 is to be aware of our socialization, of where power is held, who holds it, who has access to it, who is denied it. My personal accountability and integrity require that I look at all my relations in the place where I work and live, that I look at my socialization within my culture and hold myself accountable on behaviors I have learned that are not in alignment with my values. As a white cis-gender queer woman, that means I am both oppressed and oppressor, that there are times I must speak up and times I must be silent. As a queer white male friend said recently, addressing his church for Pride: “Am I willing to see how—not if, but how—I am complicit in the violence and oppression of our society? Am I willing to live—not merely speak (because words are cheap), but live—liberation? I would add, am I willing to make democracy, true democracy, where all voices are heard, respected, valued, and expressed, a reality?

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Here’s an example: smudging. While using medicinal plants to purify the air and oneself is a generic human practice—I’ve been doused with plenty of incense in church—smudging in North America typically uses sage, cedar, sweetgrass— all herbs that are sacred to Native North Americans. My ancestors came from Europe and in present day North America, white people have different access to resources and political power than Native North Americans. Many Native nations work hard to have treaties from the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s honored by the US government. Many Native nations struggle with poisoned waters and persistent poverty, evidence that little of the $4.2 billion dollar global wellness industry benefits them (Global Wellness Institute 2017 statistic). While I have used sage and palo santo in the past, I don’t think they are appropriate for my future. Not only am I appropriating, these plants have been exported and exploited worldwide to the point of endangering white sage’s existence, with the current drought putting more stress on the ecosystem. Living consciously, with discernment and integrity is not an easy or simple task. Dismantling my socialization will be a lifelong practice. But as antiracism activist Robin DiAngelo writes, “I don’t feel guilty about racism. I didn’t choose this socialization [author’s note: into a racism-based society], and it could not be avoided. But I am responsible for my role in it. To the degree that I have done my best in each moment to interrupt my participation, I can rest with a clearer conscience. But that clear conscience is not achieved by complacency or a sense that I have arrived” (White Fragility p.149).

Instead, I am turning to Mediterranean herbs: lavender, lemon balm, oregano, and thyme. Rediscovering—and more importantly—reinventing sacred practices connected to the lands of my ancestors honors them and myself and creates a bridge between past and future generations. That emptiness within me is a longing for the village, for a place of connection to my history, my ancestry, and my future in the weave of the world. I must attend to it, so it is not filled again with stolen idols and bloodied ceremony. I want to live with awareness and presence and not walk around with blinders on. What that looks like to me currently is to ask with sensitivity and awareness of the power I hold: Am I appreciating this practice from another culture? Am I appropriating this from another culture? Or is this practice a gift? Asking questions such as these isn’t new; environmentalists and spiritual teachers throughout the ages have asked us to look beyond the surface to what lies beneath in our thoughts, hearts, and actions. We need to look beyond solo selves and see each other, all the others we share the world with, human and non-human. As 2020 proved, we are all connected.

We never got a mezuzah on the door. Instead, a blue glass eye faces those entering. Common all-around Greece, these are thought to turn the evil eye and offer spiritual protection. My grandmothers would recognize it and know that they were home.

More information on cultural appropriation can be found here: nativegov.org/cultural-appropriation-and-wellness-guide.

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